Graeme Spencer: If Radio Spectrum Is Taonga, What Isn't?

In 2022 Labour "gifted" 20% of the 5GL spectrum to Maori - not a treaty settlement - a "gift" - along with this gift, $75 million was provided to establish and support the entity (Kāhui Whakaata - the Māori Spectrum Entity) during its formative years.

For years, the spectrum was treated as a national resource - Governments licensed or auctioned it to telecommunications companies, who paid for the right to use specific frequency bands. It was largely an administrative process, and the associated revenue would have benefited all New Zealanders.

Graeme Spencer: The CCO That Put Culture Before Consumers

Timaru District Council after a suspect consultation process have finally formed a CCO (Council Controlled Organisation) with MacKenzie District Council.

The result - a subscale entity, too small to deliver real efficiencies but big enough to add cost and distance from accountability. The worst of both worlds.

Judy Gill: Te reo Māori, taonga and the question of responsibility

Te reo Māori is frequently described as a taonga—sacred, tapu, precious—and the Treaty of Waitangi is often invoked to argue that the state therefore bears an obligation to protect it.

Increasingly, a further claim is added: that difficulty learning te reo Māori today is driven by “intergenerational trauma”. This article questions whether that trauma framework is being used with conceptual precision and evidential discipline, and whether it explains contemporary language outcomes better than simpler factors such as age, literacy, educational quality, and language use in the home.

Dave Witherow: Treaty weather

 Democracy, as a prescription for society, is all or nothing. It can’t be diluted, apportioned...

Things are getting a little heated. Simple propositions that, not long ago, would have been understood, are no longer. We see this every day and we saw it recently in Wellington in front of the Beehive, being demonstrated by a large number of people.

It is now obviously a waste of time trying to explain, or even discuss, the contentious Treaty, and its alleged Principles. There are no Principles. There never were any — and despite the well-paid sophistries of the country’s “top lawyers”, there still aren’t.

Gary Judd KC: Taonga

Pre-European Māori did not read or write. They had a completely spoken language. One of the Treaty of Waitangi challenges is to ascertain the meaning of the words used in Te Tiriti, the document written in the Māori language signed at Waitangi on 6 February 1840 by both Governor William Hobson and about 45 chiefs most of whom were from the Bay of Islands and its immediate vicinity.

Piers Seed: The ticking time-bomb under the Waitangi Tribunal

The word taonga is now deeply embedded in New Zealand’s psyche. We see it on the beautiful, glossy covers of coffee-table books and peppered amongst newspaper columns, magazines and books. We hear it trotted out reverently in Council and Government proposals and rolling from the lips of those who like to sprinkle their conversations with simple words appropriated from other cultures. It is as if we have never been without it. Taonga is an old friend as familiar and comfortable as a worn-in old slipper.

Roger Childs: A Law unto Itself – the Waitangi Tribunal

This process (decision making by the Waitangi Tribunal) has no checks and balances, no accountability to anyone, and there is no recourse to appeal. –Piers Seed

Showing up the Tribunal for what it is

In his second history book, Christchurch writer Piers Seed provides a fascinating and highly perceptive analysis of what’s wrong with the Waitangi Tribunal process. Entitled Taonga and Contra Proferentem, the author examines how the crucial Maori word taonga has evolved from meaning “property” and all that entails, in the early 19th century. Today in making judgements on claimants’ cases, the Tribunal allows taonga to mean “anything you care to name” in the guise of the wonderfully vague word “treasure”.

Mike Butler: Tribunal’s wobbly house of cards

Forty years of Waitangi Tribunal decisions have been built on a “very wobbly” house of cards, according to Piers Seed in his new book Taonga and Contra Proferentem – thoughts on the Waitangi Tribunal Process.

With a Bachelor of Engineering in electronics, this is the second book in which Seed applies the disciplines of the hard sciences to what passes as history in New Zealand.

Two years ago, he used such analysis to debunk myths around the clash between government troops and insurgents at Rangiaowhia on February 21, 1864, in Hoani’s Last Stand.

Seed’s new book shows that the Waitangi Tribunal has built its empire on a word and a concept to create its wobbly house of cards.

John Robinson: More division, more power to tangata whenua

We have all received a notice about “Proposed Plan Change 2 to the Operative Kapiti Coast District Plan 2021”. This includes a seemingly innocuous proposal to “provide for tangata whenua to develop papakainga housing developments”. This includes papakainga on ‘general title land’.

Here the select group, the tangata whenua, are members of Ngati Toa, Ngati Raukawa (Nga Hapu o Otaki) and Te Atiawa. IPI, page 58, online here

Owen Jennings: ‘Going, going, gone’

An interesting court case in Wellington. A 76 year old man sold his house to a developer. His daughter is disputing his right to do so. She is claiming there were understandings about the property not being sold because there is tikanga involved, her baby’s placenta is buried on the property and that there were clearly issues of ethnicity and cultural values at stake.

Without commenting on this particular case it does, however raise significant issues about the nation’s slide into what can only be a quagmire of confusion, uncertainty, heartache and vagueness. The harder the elitists, the media and the academics push for the adoption of Māori language, Māori ownership, Māori control, the adoption of ill-defined terms, the incorporation of Māori factors into science and, particularly, if the courts continue down the path of judicial activism by embracing ethnic and cultural values into judgements and judicial process the greater the problems will become.

Bruce Moon: Twisting Taonga

It is a pretty obvious fact that the meanings of words may change over time – even if we discount the argot of the young – you know - “a cool chick”, “a joint”.  New ideas, new technology, need words to describe them. So picture the Maoris of New Zealand, eastern Polynesians isolated for millennia in a Stone Age culture, when they observed the diversity of material wealth of the Europeans who came to our shores.  They needed words for it.  And so: Taonga:

In 1820: “property procured by the spear” - Hongi Hika in Lee and Kendall’s Maori dictionary – from “tao” - a spear.

In 1831: “possessions/property” - “nothing but timber, flax, pork and potatoes”[i] - 13 Ngapuhi chiefs writing to King William.